My sisters and brothers come up a FAIR bit for dinner at home. It's basically a normal life; a normal family home. DAD cooks and we also TAKE turns. If it's my TURN, I like to do a roast lamb or spaghetti bolognaise.

The BEATLES and The Stones were BASICALLY inspired by AMERICAN RHYTHM and BLUES.

Moving to L.A., I got really into hip-hop and trap music and basically a lot of the sounds you would MAYBE NORMALLY see in a festival, but for whatever reason, I was so INVOLVED in vinyl and house at the time, I didn't even know that I LIKED trap.

I'm BASICALLY a very HAPPY PERSON and I don't have to be ANYBODY ELSE.

It became apparent to me near the END of the album cycle for 'House Of Gold & Bones' that it had BASICALLY run its COURSE. But the band kept pushing for more dates, and I was just, like, 'It's time to stop!'

I went to a vocational high SCHOOL, which is where they basically TRAIN you to go out and dig ditches. You gotta LEARN a trade. Well, why do you gotta learn a trade? Because you're not smart ENOUGH to go to COLLEGE. That was the underlying gist of it.

I tell PEOPLE the FIRST TIME I DECIDED to write a novel I was in my mid-20s, and it was, 'Well, it's time to see if I can do this.' I basically flipped a coin to see if I was GOING to write science fiction or if I was going to do a crime novel. The coin toss went to science fiction.

I never claimed to be a computer ENGINEER, but I did train as an industrial designer, and I am a CONSUMER marketer, and I am very comfortable dealing with complex BUSINESSES and complexity in general and simplifying it - BASICALLY a systems designer.

I've seen a LOOK in dogs' EYES, a quickly vanishing look of amazed CONTEMPT, and I am CONVINCED that basically dogs think humans are nuts.

We're past the AGE of heroes and HERO kings... Most of our lives are basically MUNDANE and DULL, and it's up to the writer to find ways to MAKE them interesting.